


Of Bear Claws and Bourbons

by folignos



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 19:34:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folignos/pseuds/folignos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It all starts with a chocolate éclair."<br/>Bakery AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Bear Claws and Bourbons

**Author's Note:**

> I have been writing this for so long I've actually started to hate it.  
> All Harri's fault, direct hatred over to her, if you don't mind.  
> Disclaimer: Misleading title, bear claws and bourbons have minimal screen time. Sorry about that.

It all starts with a chocolate éclair. Well, no. If Remus is being completely honest, it starts approximately fourteen minutes and fifty three seconds before what he’s dubbing The Chocolate Éclair Incident, and also involves a large amount of caffeine and one Sirius Orion Black.

Really, Remus thinks bitterly, this could all have been avoided if he’d had time for his morning cup of tea before being dragged down to the bakery before opening. If he’d had his morning cup of tea, he wouldn’t be nearly as stressed, tired or confused, and he definitely would have been awake enough to ignore the panicked text from Sirius.

_THERES BEEN AN EXPLOSION!11_

Admittedly, if he had managed a cup of tea, Sirius would probably still have managed to get whipped cream on the ceiling fan, but you can’t win them all.

Remus makes it to the bakery in record timing [twelve minutes and change, if you’re wondering] and bursts through the door like the hounds of hell are on his tail to find Sirius balancing on a chair with three legs, trying to wipe said whipped cream off the aforementioned ceiling fan, tongue poking out the side of his mouth while James hovers, looking guilty. There is whipped cream in his hair, and his glasses are smeary, which suggests there was previously a lot more cream.

Remus takes some deep, calming breaths. And then several more.

Sirius wobbles, screeches and topples from his chair with all the drama of the fall of the Berlin wall, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. He blinks, and a dollop of cream falls from the underside of the fan and hits him in the nose.

Remus wonders idly if it’s too late to turn down James’ offer. He turns to look at him, and before he even opens his mouth, James tells him that he signed the bloody contract, they’ve got him for life now.

Remus sighs. Worth a shot. He does some more deep breathing, just to be safe, and then steps over Sirius to get the mop.

They open at nine, like always, and Peter arrives at half eight, frighteningly punctual, as always, and brings Remus a cup of tea at eight forty five exactly, with just the right amount of milk and sugar in it, and two bourbons on a plate. Remus takes a moment out of his day to thank the gods for Peter Archibald Pettigrew.

At eight fifty eight, the cream is mostly gone, but Remus was unable to salvage the éclairs, and they are left, half deflated and half exploded and all in the bin. He promises to make Sirius leave his station to apologise personally to every customer that ordered an éclair. Sirius cowers behind his baking trays.

At nine twenty three, Lily Evans appears in the shop, and Remus sighs again, before sending Sirius to distract James, who’s hiding in the back, icing Dr McGonagall’s cat shaped cake, and heading to the counter to run damage control. ‘Morning, Lily,’ he says, grinning hopefully. She smiles back, but puts the cardboard box on the counter between them. He doesn’t want to ask, but he knows he has to. ‘What did he do now?’ he asks. She flips open the lid. He’s almost afraid to look.

Remus is going to suffocate him with an icing bag.

Around the edge of the cake, he’s iced ‘Fancy a drink?’ over and over and over, in tiny, admittedly impeccable cursive, writing.

He looks, takes it all in, makes sure he isn’t hallucinating, and considers having a small emotional breakdown. He doesn’t think people would notice, really, but he does yet more deep breathing exercises [that one appointment with a therapist has been indispensable, and definitely worth the funny look when he told her his high-stress occupation was the owner of a bakery]. When he’s quite sure he can speak without sounding like he’s having a stroke, he says ‘I’ll talk to him,’ and whisks the cake away under the counter, where maybe he can pretend it says something normal.

_Happy Birthday Granny_ , perhaps.

‘I can’t apologise enough, Lily,’ he says, several times, while trying to catch Peter’s eye from where he’s sitting at his desk, hopefully filling out some kind of form that will prohibit Sirius or James from ever doing anything with whipped cream again. Ever.

She makes some kind of non-committal noise, but she’s smiling, so she’s probably forgiven him. Probably.  He promises to get Sirius to ice the next cake properly, and gives her a slice of carrot cake on the house before she leaves, and he turns his potentially murderous rage onto James.

Luckily, Peter diverts him with tea and another bourbon, and Remus has a nice, relaxing sit down in his office, leaving Peter in charge for twenty minutes. Peter doesn’t like being in charge, but he’s polite, competent, eager to please, and therefore three times as useful as Sirius and James put together.

It’s a quiet morning, apart from a brief period of insanity when Albus turns up at about half ten to buy a lemon drizzle cake or three and ends up teaching Remus the latin for _oh dear me, I seem to have left my pyjamas in ancient Rome_ and reminds Peter that it’s bad luck to stroke a black cat before striding out of the door in his turquoise suit, beard neatly plaited and thrown over his shoulder like a scarf. It leaves Remus feeling like he needs another lie down, and possibly a nap, but James and Sirius have been left together unsupervised for almost eight minutes, and metaphorical alarms are going off in Remus’ head.

‘James.’ Remus is very calm. He’s going to remain calm. He will not raise his voice. He will not have a mental breakdown and jump out of the window. They’re on the ground floor, it would be more embarrassing than fatal. ‘Is that the Weasley wedding cake.’ It’s not a question.

‘Maybe?’ James says. Sirius is suddenly very busy taking a tray of bear claws out of the oven on the other side of the bakery.

‘There are dicks on it.’

‘…maybe?’ James says again. He starts edging away. Remus closes his eyes, counts to ten, opens them, and then counts to ten again. He has never been more tempted to start drinking before eleven AM.

He opens his mouth, closes it and opens it again, waiting for sound to come out, but all he gets is a somewhat strangled _why_ in the tone that people generally reserve for _why do Monday mornings exist,_  or _why does God hate me._

[Remus is pretty sure God hates him for not being able to control James and Sirius every time they say something like ‘You know what would be a great idea? _Coffee water balloons.’_ but that’s not the issue right now.]

‘It’s fine, I’m going to ice over them anyway, calm down, Remus. I was just teaching Pads how to use the icing bag, since I suspect I am to be banned from any further conversations with miss Evans, icing or otherwise.’

‘You suspect right,’ Remus says grimly, watching as James carefully scrapes off the adornments and begins re-icing swags across the rim of the cake, before pretending that he’s wandering off to check on Sirius, and make sure his bear claws are shaped like bear claws and not… other things. He’s filling them with some kind of apple sauce that will be murder to get out of the machine later, but he’s quiet, and seems to be doing what he’s supposed to be, and, bonus, the pastries are actually shaped like bear claws. He stands and watches him for a few moments before looking over his shoulder. Peter’s in the office, James is distracted mixing a new colour of icing, and there’s no one looking lost in the shop, so he sidles closer. ‘So,’ he says, and sees Sirius’ grin out of the corner of his eye from where he’s deliberately not staring at Sirius’ hands, long and pale and immaculately clean as they lay out pastries on a silver tray. ’Last night.’ Sirius’ grin gets wider. ‘That was…’ Remus pauses, thinks, says ‘nice,’ and immediately regrets it, because _nice_ , really?

Sirius is smirking now as he fills one tray and slides it onto a table as he starts to fill another one.  ‘Once again I’m reminded that you are grand maestro of words, Moony, choosing the word ‘nice’ over several other much better ones like ‘fabulous’ and ‘sizzling’ and ‘oh Sirius, don’t stop, yes right there’. You’re turning an alarming shade of red, by the way.’ Remus makes a dignified sort of strangled noise, and Sirius dodges around him, a tray in each hand, a hundred times more graceful than Remus.

He hides in the back for a long time after that, letting Peter deal with the customers and hoping against hope that James has managed to focus long enough to remember to make the blown sugar balls to go with the Shacklebolt cake order while he pretends to do inventory and writes down how many bags of flour and icing sugar they have. Eventually he feels like his face might be normal coloured again, and he leaves the clipboard hanging on the hook, ready to go back and finish up after they’re closed for the night. The door opens and Sirius slips in, grinning again as he shuts the door behind him, making it look very deliberate and final. ‘I can’t believe nice was the only word you could think of,’ he says, complaining, but he’s leaning against the wall, tilting his head in a very distracting way as he looks Remus up and down, bottom lip caught between his teeth.

Remus’ mouth is suddenly very dry. ‘In my defence,’ he starts, but is prevented from continuing by Sirius’ tongue in his mouth, which is sudden but not at all unwelcome, and is followed by a hand skirting across his belt and tugging his shirt out of where it’s tucked into his trousers. Remus puts up some token resistance, mostly for show before sinking into the kiss, settling one hand on the back of Sirius’ head and the other on his hip as he pulls Sirius closer. Sirius walks him backwards until he’s pushing him up against a bare section of wall between shelving units, fumbling at Remus’ belt buckle. He mouths across Remus’ jawline before biting at the juncture between neck and jaw. He told Remus last night that his favourite thing about him was his angles, how he’s sharp and angular. He loves the jut of his hip, the plane of his chest, the hollows made by prominent collarbones. He’d kissed his way up Remus’ sternum, left bruises on his shoulders and in the dip of his throat, and now he yanks on Remus’ tie, loosening it enough to unbutton the top few buttons of his shirt and press a wet, open mouthed kiss right on top of the bruise. Remus thinks vaguely, as Sirius finally unbuckles his belt and slides a hand into his trousers, that this is all very undignified, but then Sirius’ hand slips into his underwear, and suddenly he’s not thinking very much at all.

After they’ve both cleaned up, and Remus has rebuckled his belt and remembered how to tie a tie, but has looked at his reflection in the mirror hanging inexplicably on the back door and decided his hair is beyond salvageable, he picks up the clipboard again, hauls open the industrial fridge door and starts counting eggs. Counting eggs is normal, counting eggs is something the manager of a bakery does. Shagging the employees is something the manager of a bakery does not do, and the manager of a bakery definitely does not make pathetic sighing sounds when said employees kiss the back of his neck before sauntering back into the main room to make quiches. Remus wonders idly whether he should just give up all pretence of being a professional and become a full time person who hides at home and never has to deal with feelings ever.

He’s eventually chased out of the store room at quarter to one when his stomach rumbles and he remembers being interrupted from his breakfast by the Whipped Cream Incident. Sirius has made sandwiches, and Remus eats his locked in his office, citing paperwork, because he’s learning that every time he looks at Sirius he starts smiling like an escaped mental patient and really, crazy smile plus his hair is not a good look for someone who’s supposed to be in charge.

He stays locked in there for forty five minutes until Peter pokes his head around the door and says that he might want to come out and separate James and Sirius, because James just knocked the head off of Dr McGonagall’s cake, and it took Sirius an hour and a half to put the cake together, _I think you should come now Remus please_. He heaves himself out of his chair and steps out of his office just in time to avert a cake fight, which is wonderful timing for two reasons. Reason one being that there is still whipped cream on the ceiling fan and he doesn’t want to be cleaning up cake until one in the morning, like last time, and reason two being that there are _actual customers in the shop, what were you two thinking?_ So that’s a fun twenty minutes, convincing Sirius to a) fix the cake and b) not violently murder James with a slab of shortcrust pastry. He wins the first point and concedes the second by convincing Sirius not to do it where there are witnesses, and by that point, Peter’s made tea and everyone’s fairly happy to let it go. They’re all perched on counters, Sirius reshaping another cat head shaped cake to replace the one lying on the floor [and Remus should really clean that up at some point, or at least make Peter do it], when Peter puts his cup down and asks if Remus and Sirius are going out again tonight.

Remus does a remarkable job of not inhaling the teacup, and instead considers very quickly finding God and praying that the earth opens up underneath him. He settles for choking on his tea and turning very very red. ‘What?’ he rasps eventually. Sirius is very quiet, which is disturbing no matter how you look at it, and his back is facing them, so they can’t see his face, but Remus has spent enough time around him in the past fifteen years to recognise the set of his shoulders, the tension in his neck, to know that neither of those are a good sign. Peter looks between them, and suddenly realisation dawns on him. ‘Oh, was it supposed to be a secret?’ he asks, flushing almost as spectacularly as Remus.  James is watching the whole affair with the expression of someone watching a particularly good episode of TV. Remus makes some non-committal mumbling noises, and looks down at his cup. ‘Only,’ Peter continues, taking another sip of tea. ‘you weren’t being very subtle. Me and James have known for weeks.’ Remus wonders how long he’ll be able to barricade himself in his flat for before he runs out of milk, or if he’ll even make it to his flat. Maybe if he makes a break for it now, while they all have their hands full.

James nudges Remus in the side and offers him what is probably meant to be a supportive smile, but kind of makes him look a little bit deranged before he kicks Sirius in the shins and tells them both to ‘Stop being such a pair of girly lumps and just declare your big gay love affair from the rooftops.’

Remus thinks that’s supposed to be some kind of acceptance, and really, he’ll take any that he can get. The tension in Sirius’ shoulders is gone, and when he finishes shaping the cake, he turns and flicks part of the leftovers at James, which ends up degenerating into the food fight he’d literally just prevented _five minutes ago_.

Remus thinks about getting another job sometimes, but he looks at Peter and James, and especially Sirius who catches his eye and smiles back, blinding, and he realises that while other places probably wouldn’t result in getting his tie dipped in jam at least once a week, other places also probably wouldn’t let him flick the closed sign on the door three hours before closing time, drop the blinds, and join in with the food fight that is erring on the side of an all-out food war. So really, he thinks, ducking the ball of roll-out icing that James sends his way with a grin, you win some, you lose some. He just seems to be winning more often than not, when he thinks about it.


End file.
